Top 5 Reasons: Why You Should Not Buy Bulk Email List for Email Marketing

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Email marketing is one of the many online marketing strategies available for online businesses. With email marketing, you can reach millions of potential customers worldwide with just one click of a button. This online marketing strategy is usually done through, as the name suggests, emails and customers’ email addresses. This strategy is very viable and very successful for building online businesses.

Of course, before you are able to make use of this strategy, it is vital that you obtain something first – a compiled list of email addresses wherein you can send your messages, as well as promote your business or your products. However, obtaining such a list manually can take some time. That is why most online businesses avail of an option that can let them get these compiled lists easily and quickly, and that is by opting for bulk email lists.

Bulk email lists contain thousands of email addresses from various sources (i.e. customers, companies, etc.). By availing of these bulk email lists, online businesses can easily promote their business or products to thousands of people worldwide. By opting for even more lists, they can expand their business reaches worldwide, as they can reach thousands if not millions of customers with a simple press of a button.

However, buying bulk email lists is usually disadvantageous. While it may let you reach thousands of customers easily, it has its own set of disadvantages as well. Here are the top 5 reasons on why you should not buy bulk email lists for your email marketing campaign:

1. Bulk email lists usually have inactive and dormant email accounts

Making a new email address for yourself is very easy. Simply go to a website, fill up a short form listing all your personal information (or not), press register and that’s it! You have yourself a new email address! Easy, isn’t it?

And due to this, it is easy to change email addresses, leaving the previous ones inactive and dormant. Bulk email lists usually have these inactive and dormant email accounts as these lists are not updated anymore. This means that on those thousands of email addresses listed on bulk email lists, a percentage of it is more likely to be inactive and not used anymore by their owners, which means you won’t be able to promote your business or products on these inactive accounts.

2. Bulk email lists contain duplicate email accounts

Not only do bulk email lists contain inactive and dormant accounts, they are also most likely to have lots of duplicate email accounts.

As mentioned earlier, it is too simple to make another email address. What if the owner makes a slight mistake on his preferred username? What if the owner thought of a better username instead of the one he / she is using right now? The answer to both questions is simple – make another email address with a slight change on the username. This results to a duplicate of that previous email account, which means you are sending the same message to the same person. Again, a good percentage of these types of accounts are included in these bulk email lists.

3. Bulk email lists contain fake email accounts

Most bulk email lists sellers include fake email accounts on their lists in order to make it look plenty. After all, it is very easy to make up a fake email address using a fake username. And again, a small percentage of these email accounts listed on these bulk email lists are likely to be fake.

This is worse than the latter cases, as with the other cases, you can still reach them should they pick up on their email accounts again. With fake email accounts you won’t be able to send your message to anyone.

Also to note, there are bulk email lists that ONLY contain fake email accounts. This means that you are sending your messages to no one in particular. This also means that you have wasted your money for nothing.

4. Bulk email lists are quite expensive, especially for a budding online business

Buying bulk email lists can cost you a whole lot of money. It can cost from hundreds of dollars to even thousands of dollars for just around 1,000 to 10,000 email accounts. Remember that not all these accounts are active or available (read the previous items), so you may or may not get your money’s worth. Instead of spending thousands of dollars buying these bulk email lists, it is better that you gather your needed email accounts manually using opt-in forms on your website.

6. It is cheaper and more effective to gather legit email addresses manually rather than buying a bulk email list

While it is not easy to gather thousands of email addresses in a short time, it is more effective, more efficient, and cheaper to do so manually. By gathering these email addresses yourself, you are sure that you are able to reach out to your customers, thus getting responses from your sent messages. However, the (only) disadvantage to this is that you will only be able to get thousands of email addresses if you are very diligent in doing so. Also, it can take months or even years to gather such an amount even with such diligence. There are lot of techniques out there that can help you accelerate the gathering of email addresses. For example, you can use a software like the Intelligent WP Popup plugin to increase your opt-in rate.

One Comment

Katie | April 21, 2015

Most of these issues pointed out can be solved by running health and anti-spam checks on your bulk email list. These types of checks remove bad and invalid email addresses and should be run regularly on your email list to ensure a higher deliverability and lower bounce rate. Like any marketing tactic, developing an email lead generation campaign means doing your research, getting your data from only reputable data providers and using an email sending platform capable of sending to purchased data (i.e. Clickback).